Central Texas Flooding: Worst May Be To Come

October 18th, 2018

The worst flooding in the Austin area may still be to come:

The LCRA is now projecting that Lake Travis may rise to between 705-710 ft. elevation by Friday, approaching the all-time record crest of 710.4 ft. from Christmas, 1991.

Four flood gates are now open, and the LCRA says they may open four more Thursday, which would exceed the previous record of six open floodgates during a 1957 flood.

Additional rainfall is forecast through Thursday, with 1-2 inches possible, along with some isolated 4 inch totals. A Flash Flood Watch has been expanded from the Hill Country to the Austin metro area.

The LCRA is warning of serious flooding, and encouraging people to take precautions to protect life and property.

Eight open floodgates on Mansfield dam means eight open gates on Tom Miller damn just north of downtown Austin. Dont be surprised if you see a repeat of that “Steve Ray Vaughn Statue Flooded” pictures we saw during the 2013 flash floods.

Keep an eye on road closures, pay attention to the evacuation notices, and pack your bugout bag and be ready to go if you’re in low-lying areas or anywhere near the river.

Here’s late blues guitar legend John Campbell with “When the Levee Breaks”:

Update: LCRA says no additional floodgates need to be opened today: “LCRA will NOT need to open additional floodgates at Mansfield Dam today. It is still possible we will need to open up to four additional floodgates over the next few days.”

More information here.

The Onion On Bobby Francis

October 17th, 2018

All I can say is: Nice one, Onion.

Even funnier if you live in the Austin area…

(And more from the same source.)

(Hat tip: Will Franklin on Twitter.)

Dangerous Flooding Along the Llano River

October 16th, 2018

If you hadn’t heard, heavy rains have caused serious flooding along the Llano river and the Texas hill country.

The Farm to Market 2900 bridge in Kingsland over Lake LBJ (just before the Llano and Colorado rivers meet) has collapsed:

Authorities have evacuated anyone within a quarter-mile of the river, including large portions of Marble Falls. The Lower Colorado River Authority opened the Mansfield and Tom Miller dams at noon.

Nor is the hazard limited to the river:

Williamson County conducted two water rescues because of flooding Tuesday morning. One was a vehicle in high water off CR 251 in Andice, and both people were transported to a local hospital.

The second was a school bus off CR 177 in Leander. The driver and one student on broad were rescued without injuries.

I would tell you to check the low water crossing map for the Austin area, but there’s no need: Every low water crossing in Austin is closed, flooded or on caution right now:

The cliched phrase of choice is there for a reason:

Pay attention to the evacuation notices, and pack your bugout bag and be ready to go if you’re in low-lying areas or anywhere near the river.

As for myself, I’m fine. The last time I looked at a topology map I was some 85′ higher than the Mansfield Dam spillway, so I’m safe unless we get a flood of Biblical proportion.

Google Introduces New Room 101 App In China

October 16th, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Beijing, China) Today Google announced they were releasing a new application developed for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Dubbed “Room 101,” the new software not only tracks the “social credit rating” of all citizens, but also records all attempts to break government laws, as well as all relevant information for enhancing state security interrogations of subversives.

“While completing Project Dragonfly, we became aware that there were other Chinese state security needs we could be filing,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “That’s when we started work on Room 101.”

“Before, MSS officers had to rely on cumbersome file folders for surveillance of Chinese subjects scattered throughout regional offices. We’re bringing all that information to their fingertips!”

Among the information Room 101 tracks for every subject:

  • Their day-to-day commuting travels schedule, and where police might most easily pick them up
  • Attempts to evade the Great Firewall of China
  • Any subversive information found on their PCs or phones
  • Membership in Falun Gong or human rights organizations
  • Homosexual tendencies or activities
  • Forbidden religious affiliations (especially Christian, Muslim, or “unapproved” Buddhist sects)
  • Their greatest fears and phobias
  • Which subjects might be most susceptible to public shaming campaigns
  • Which of their relatives might be most effectively interrogated to elicit information from, or to force the subject’s compliance
  • Which body parts they are most in fear of losing.
  • There are also modules for leading modules for self-criticism sessions, pain tracking, and a variety of prefilled forms for subjects to confess their sins against the Communist Party.

    Pichai indicated that an initial trial on Google’s own personnel showed great promise at tracking and eliminating wrongthink.

    Pichai said he looked forward to rolling out modified versions of Room 101 to other countries.

    “If you want to know the future, imagine Google tracking every thought of every person on earth, forever.”

    The Islamic State Counterattacks

    October 15th, 2018

    The outcome of the investment of the Hajin pocket seemed perfectly clear: As in Raqqa and Mosul, U.S. backed forced would slowly but surely reduce the pocket in grinding urban warfare until all of its Islamic State defenders were dead or captured.

    War has a way of throwing wrenches into the gears of things that seem perfectly clear.

    A few days ago, the Islamic State remnants in the Hajin pocket launched a series of counterattacks that were at least moderately successful, even allowing them to overrun a local refugee camp and took as many as 130 families hostage before the SDF forced them back. In other places the Islamic State appears to have overrun and taken SDF positions. Some even got far enough to attack a post on the Iraqi border. There was even a reappearance of some of the improvised armor vehicles the Islamic State used in earlier stages of the war, despite unquestioned allied in-theater airspace control.

    Every black rifle below represents an Islamic State counterattack:

    At least some of those positions the Islamic State took seem to have been retaken, but the situation right now is unclear and fluid.

    Jerry Pournelle used to say “In war, everything is very simple, but simple things are very difficult.” The Islamic State may be all-but-dead as a territory-holding entity, but it’s not dead dead yet..

    The Project Veritas Deep State Videos

    October 14th, 2018

    Remember back all the way to last month, when the the Kavanaugh hearings went from senators questioning a nominee over his philosophy to ideological nuclear war over what one woman may have remembered about something that may have happened at a nameless party at an unknown person’s house at an unremembered location sometime in the early 1980s?

    Just as that was sucking up every last bit of America’s political oxygen, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas had the misfortune to start dropping hidden camera videos of deep state bureaucrats bragging how they worked for “democratic socialism”/”social justice”/etc. on the taxpayer’s dime. If you’re like me, you may have been aware of the videos, but were too busy focusing on Kavanaugh stuff to actually watch them. As a public service, I thought it would be good to post all those videos in one place now that people might actually have time to view them all.

    Bonus! Here’s a Prager University video of O’Keefe talking about his various earlier media bias videos.

    Gosnell Opened Yesterday

    October 13th, 2018

    You might want to consider seeing it if you’re the “watching movies in theaters” type.

    Here’s the trailer:

    LinkSwarm for October 12, 2018

    October 12th, 2018

    Trying to edit this last night brought up a repeated 502 error, since fixed. So enjoy this LinkSwarm as a triumph of persistence over technology:

  • How the Kavanaugh fight united the right around President Donald Trump:

    Trumpism is now the unregretted tattoo that altered the Republican coalition, making it edgier, more rugged, and more relentless in pursuing its policy objectives.

    Confronted with a liberal self-styled “resistance” movement—whose very name reeks of the virtue-signaling that galls the right—Trump responded in kind. Left-wingers march in the streets and chase prominent conservatives out of restaurants; he bows his back and marches Kavanaugh onto the bench for a lifetime. Liberals feel better for a weekend; pragmatic conservatives get to feel vindicated for decades. Good trade.

    Trump not only refused to rescind Kavanaugh’s nomination when the confirmation process got rocky—as both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had done with flagging nominees—he barnstormed the country and held campaign rallies in jam-packed basketball arenas rallying his coalition behind Kavanaugh. After playing nice for a handful of surprisingly diplomatic days, enabling a judiciary committee hearing to fairly hear the allegations against Kavanaugh, Trump retrieved his megaphone from its holster and unleashed on the judge’s liberal Senate and media antagonists.

    Conservatives who may have been privately uncertain on how to proceed in the face of the allegations found the light in the flames of Trump’s heat. The consensus on the right became clear: this was not a competition of memories between two middle-aged professionals who grew up privileged at boozy teen parties in suburban Maryland. By last Saturday’s confirmation vote, this episode was not even predominantly about Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford; it was a tectonic struggle between the voters’ chosen Republican government and the ruthless Democratic minority seeking to topple it by any means necessary.

  • Republicans quintuple fundraising in wake of Kavanaugh hearings.
  • There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Democrat In 2018.” Focused on the Tennessee senate race, but applicable everywhere. “Dianne Feinstein picks your judges, Bernie Sanders runs the budget and Chuck Schumer runs everything.” I’ve been making the same point since 2010. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Jay Cost, by way of Alexander Hamilton, explains why America won’t have a another civil war: “To put matters bluntly, we do not have to like one another, so long as we continue to make money off one another.” To which I would add: Only left-wing loudmouths on Twitter are really trying to provoke a civil war. Average people rarely mention the things that rage huge on the Internet in their day-to-day lives…
  • Remember, it’s only a “mob” if it’s made up of Republicans. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of mob violence:

  • Some anti-Kavanaugh protestors were indeed paid Astroturf. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Border agents in Texas arrested three sex offenders in two days, one of whom had been jailed in Dallas. All three men have been previously convicted of offenses involving a minor, according to officials with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.” (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abbott’s twitter feed.)
  • Hurricane Michael leaves at least six dead.
  • Video of the aftermath:

  • Speaking of devastating: Holy moly!

  • Least anyone think I’m reflexively pro-Trump, his idea to increase the amount of Ethanol in gasoline is an astonishingly bad idea for numerous reasons. And get ready for it to start destroying your lawnmower engines…
  • How Soviet Communism tried to kill weekends. (Hat tip: Charles Martin on Twitter.)
  • The Navy is slowly working its way back to actual readiness. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Army to add WindGuard active radar defense systems to work with Trophy active defense systems on M1 tanks.
  • Mass criminal roundup in northern Mississippi.

    Around 150 gang members were arrested or validated with affiliations to the Simon City Royals, Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Vice Lords, and the Aryan Brotherhood.

    Over 200 registered sex offenders living within the Northern District of Mississippi were checked for compliance in regards to sex offender registration requirements. Around 150 home visits were conducted on high- to moderate-risk offenders on probation with the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the United States Probation Service.

    Overall, 255 violent offenders were picked up during Operation Triple Beam. They were wanted on charges including homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, illegal gun crimes, narcotics possession and distribution, robbery, arson, and sex offender registration violations.

  • More voting fraud down in the Rio Grande Valley:

    Following a nine-day trial, a district court judge has voided the results of the City of Mission mayoral election after finding the winning campaign engaged in a conspiracy to bribe voters and harvest mail-in ballots.

    Norberto “Beto” Salinas, the former mayor of Mission of 20 years, filed a lawsuit against current mayor Armando “Doc” O’Caña after several witnesses claimed bribery, mail-in ballot harvesting, and illegal voting during the June 9 runoff election. On Friday, 93rd District Court visiting Judge J. Bonner Dorsey agreed with Salinas and voided the results of the election. “I cannot ascertain the true outcome of the election,” Dorsey said.

    Salinas’ camp had to prove 157 votes were illegally cast, the number the candidate lost by in the election. Dorsey ruled, “I hold or find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the number of illegal votes was in excess of 158.”

  • China blinks thrice over the trade war:

    First, it conceded in August by removing U.S. oil imports from a list of possible duties. Two months earlier, China – perhaps trying to either intimate U.S. oil producers (who have been largely supportive of Trump’s policies thus far) who would in turn pressure President Trump, or either by pressuring Trump directly, indicated it would levy a 25 percent duty on U.S. oil imports.

    Second, since China is the largest buyer of American crude, Beijing likely discarded one of its strongest bargaining chips in the trade war so far. Some reports claim that U.S. oil imports to China are worth $8 billion all by themselves, so erasing oil from the tariff list reduced the value of sanctioned goods by roughly one-third.

    As far as Beijing’s LNG tariff threats are concerned, the reduction from an earlier 25 percent duty to 10 percent could also be considered another blink on China’s part. Beijing, though it does have a host of other gas and LNG suppliers, at the end of the day still needs American LNG as the country continues to pivot away from dirtier burning coal needed for power production in favor of cleaning burning natural gas. By 2020, per government mandate, gas is earmarked to make up at least 10 percent of China’s energy mix, with further earmarks by 2030.

  • Creepy porn lawyer endorses Beto.
  • NFL running back legend Jim Brown comes out against NFL players taking a knee:

    “I am an American. That flag is my flag, and I want to represent it that day.”

    How many tweets it takes before a white liberal calls him “Uncle Tom”: One.

  • Speaking of Twitter, they’ve banned conservative GayPatriot again.
  • “Cant find a Nazi to punch? Make one!” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Cost for male student to defend himself from charges of sexual assault even though the girl admitted the sex was mutual: $12,000. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
  • Austin writer decides that maybe he shouldn’t spend every waking moment of his life high on weed:

    My son was born in 2002. I didn’t have an office job, so I was around a lot to get high and enjoy the cartoons. I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half. Of course I put him in danger because I couldn’t stop getting high. I was a drug addict.

    Snip.

    In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was “self-medicating” to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Facebook Engineer Quits Over Company’s Mob-Like Attacks On Anyone Opposed To ‘Left-Leaning Ideology.’”
  • Carlos Danger is eligable for early release.
  • Dallas City Council lives in fear that the state legislature may actually allow voters to turn down tax increases.
  • “Amazon Raises Minimum Wage For Workers Building Their Own Robotic Replacements.”
  • Beto Boomlet Busts

    October 11th, 2018

    Remember all that breathless talk on how Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was going to beat incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz as part of a giant “blue wave” against President Donald Trump?

    New polls say: Not so much.

    According to a New York Times poll, Cruz leads Democratic challenger O’ Rourke by nine points. The crosstabs further down the page show a 10 point Republican-over-Democrat edge among respondents, 38% to 28%, which much more closely mirrors previous exit polls than any of the other 2018 Texas Senate race polls I’ve covered. The piece also shows different results based on different turnout models; if the electorate looks like it did in 2014 (the last midterm election), Cruz lead is closer to 16 points. (Hat tip: Empower Texans, which notes that early October polls for Texas races like this have understated Republican support by 4-5 point.)

    A Quinnipac poll also has Cruz up by nine points. (That poll had Republican ID at 35%, Democrat at 23%.)

    Other links on the race:

  • The Cult of Beto:

    There is no way Robert Francis O’Rourke, alias “Beto,” a.k.a. the no-doubt gleaming future of the Democratic Party is as delusional about his prospects for success as his followers. That would be impossible.

    The Texas congressman is your average 46-year-old liberal failson politico, the grandson of a secretary of the Navy, the son of a judge, a hanger-on in his party who graduated from playing in an amazingly bad hardcore punk band to a seat on the El Paso City Council. After that, he challenged Rep. Silvestre Reyes, an eight-term Democratic incumbent and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, with the help of outside cash and endorsements from both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The two issues of crucial importance to reviving the fortunes of the working class on which O’Rourke fought his campaign were support for same-sex marriage and drug legalization, both of which Reyes, a Catholic, opposed.

    Now O’Rourke is the Democratic nominee facing off against Sen. Ted Cruz. This is not some prize that party leadership granted to its favorite son. Defeating a sitting Republican senator in the Lone Star State is the kind of impossible job you give to someone you know slightly but don’t much care about, someone minimally competent but ultimately expendable, someone whose particular qualities don’t matter all that much because it’s a just a slot that needs to be filled and you’re just happy someone is bored or desperate enough to fill it — the kind of job you give, in other words, to Beto.

    Snip.

    No single article or tweet could do justice to the brain-destroying tedium of hyperbole, the willful exaggeration, the gushing faddishness, the hipster capitalist complacency, the novelty songwriting contest banality, the experimental filmmaker commercial-directing pseudo-profundity, the sheer late-night TV-level humorlessness of the Beto cult. In a recent column Dana Milbank promised to reveal the ingredients behind “the special sauce that flavors Betomania.” Here they are:

    • “O’Rourke’s cool factor: skateboarding at Whataburger, playing the air drums, doing his laundry on Facebook Live, and scoring appearances with Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert …”
    • Fifty thousand people attended a — free — Willie Nelson concert at which he appeared.
    • “His partisan jabs are delicate.”
    • He sometimes says “pendejo.”

    Snip.

    It’s worth recalling that excitable rank-and-file Democrats do this to themselves every few years, especially in Texas. Remember Wendy Davis and the famous shoes with which she was going to vault from the floor of the Texas Statehouse to the governor’s mansion, the White House, and, presumably, to infinity and beyond? The last I heard, after losing the governor’s race in a spectacular landslide she was doing wine-and-cheese one-offs with F-listers at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where she signed the electric pink Nikes for a lucky fan who had purchased them with his own money years earlier at her estate sale.

  • Jim Geraghty points out the obvious. “And no, Beto O’Rourke does not look like he’s going to win in Texas, which will raise tough questions about whether the $23 million donated to O’Rourke’s campaign could have been better spent elsewhere.”

  • A review of the First Cruz-O’Rourke debate.
  • Twitchy has a roundup, including this:

  • Evidently dozens of fawning profiles in national liberal publications doesn’t actually translate into winning over Texas voters. Who knew? Well, besides Wendy Davis…

    Google Embraces Censorship

    October 10th, 2018

    The leadership of Google is very, very upset that you commoners keep making political choices of which they disapprove, so they’ve crafted a document to justify why they have to censor your views. They favor a “European” regime to emphasize “safety” from your non-liberal views over that pesky and outdated “free speech.”

    The fact that they actually label the document “The Good Censor” sort of gives the game away, doesn’t it?

    An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the “American tradition” of free speech on the internet is no longer viable.

    Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a “blip” in history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filter into its products.

    But the 85-page briefing, titled “The Good Censor,” admits that Google and other tech platforms now “control the majority of online conversations” and have undertaken a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

    Examples cited in the document include the 2016 election and the rise of Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

    Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the document should be considered internal research, and not an official company position.

    The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a “utopian narrative” that has been “undermined” by recent global events as well as “bad behavior” on the part of users. It can be read in full below.

    It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers. “This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations,” says the document.

    You can tell the document has came out a while ago (the date on it is March 2018), since the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy still plays a prominent role.

    PP26-34 – The briefing explains how “users behaving badly” undermines free speech on the internet and allows “crummy politicians to expand their influence.” The briefing bemoans that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” are allowed a voice alongside “revolutionaries, whistleblowers, and campaigners.”

    “Social Justice Warriors: Good! Republicans: Bad!” How dare the proles be allowed to express approval for politicians of which we disapprove? And always remember that “racists, misogynists, and oppressors” is SJW-speak for anyone who refuses to toe the party line.

    P45 – After warning about the rise of online hate speech, the briefing approvingly cites Sarah Jeong, infamous for her hate speech against white males (Google is currently facing a lawsuit alleging it discriminates against white males, among other categories).
    P45 – The briefing bemoans the fact that the internet has until recently been a level playing field, warning that “rational debate is damaged when authoritative voices and ‘have a go’ commentators receive equal weighting.”

    “Stop embarrassing our experts! Only experts with approved political opinions should be allowed to hold the conch!”

    Page 70 indicates the shift to censorship is in response to “user demand,” which is false in the aggregate. Users aren’t clamoring for censorship, only the SJW hard left is doing that. Ordinary users want freedom of information, not what Google thinks we should be reading because the left keeps losing elections.

    It ends with lots of fig-leafs about “transparency,” but the real purpose of the doc is to talk about the “problems” of free speech.

    You can read the entire document itself in all its 85 pages of PowerPoint glory.

    Google’s assertions to the contrary, this is not an internal document to decide what to do, this is an internal document to justify what they were already doing.

    I don’t want my Internet search engine to be a “good” censor, or indeed any kind of censor. I don’t want my search results filtered for the “correct” opinions Google’s far left leadership wants me to hold. Between this, James Damore’s firing, and their decision to build a better censorship engine for China, Google already made the decision to embrace their inner censor before this document was ever commissioned.

    Now would be a good time to switch your default search engine to DuckDuckGo, if you haven’t already…